For artist Ahmad Tallaa, the body doesn’t forget. Tension outlasts the event that caused it and struggle leaves a residue long after the struggle itself has passed. This concept anchors Tallaa’s The Living Archive, presented by Firetti Contemporary at Alserkal Avenue. As his most comprehensive solo presentation to date, it brings together large-scale portraits, sculpture, works on paper, artist books and a site-specific tile installation, all centered on how memory and physical displacement persist over time.
Although born in Damascus in 1994 and trained at Damascus University, Tallaa is now based in Sharjah. The geographical shift between the two being one that informs his studio practice directly. Tallaa creates his large-scale portraits using chalk powder, glue, acrylic and UAE desert sand. By embedding local earth into canvases shaped by memories of Syria, he physically binds his present environment to his past. The resulting surfaces appear weathered and excavated. “My process is akin to an archaeological excavation, where form crystallises directly out of raw practice,” Tallaa tells MOJEH.
Instead of depicting specific individuals, his textured, semi-abstract portraits serve as records of human resilience. Tallaa describes them as documents and witnesses of a shared era, figures that are marked by hardship but are not defined by it. That same logic repeats across the gallery walls. A tile installation of recycled wood panels – sand, charcoal and pigment worked into faint facial contours – shifts slowly from panel to panel, as if one face were slowly becoming another. While on the other hand, Tallaa’s sculptures take the inquiry into three dimensions: fissured, sleeping heads balanced on scored stone and cylindrical bases, caught somewhere between rest and collapse.
The Living Archive withholds closure as the artist isn’t interested in resolving what displacement does. The show depicts the way memory actually behaves, incomplete and still forming. If there’s an archive, it’s an open one, one still being added to. The Living Archive is on view at Firetti Contemporary, Alserkal Avenue, Dubai, from 21 September to 11 November.
Originally published in the September 2026 issue of MOJEH Magazine. Subscribe here
